New Week Same Humans #46
DeepMind create a virtual playground to train a new kind of AI. Crime app Citizen wants to launch an on-demand police force. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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💡 In this week’s Sunday note I wrote about social collectives and their role in humanity’s greatest advances. Go here to read Our Collective Genius. 💡
This week, DeepMind teach an AI to be great at video games that it hasn’t yet played.
Neighbourhood security app Citizen want to launch a private on-demand police service. What could possibly go wrong?
And NASA give us a glimpse of their new supersonic jet.
Let’s go!
🤖 AIs in dreamland
This week, news from the AI dream machine that is DeepMind. And a dose of reality, courtesy of some nightmarish innovations.
Back in New Week #39, I wrote about a DeepMind paper on how exposing AIs to trial and error learning processes may lead us to highly evolved artificial minds. This week, the company published new research that brings that idea to vivid life.
Researchers created a rainbow-themed virtual playground called XLand, and used it to train AI agents to be brilliant at numerous video games with no prior exposure to the games themselves.
Famously, DeepMind have trained AIs to an elite level at all kinds of games, from Pong to Go. But the ability of those agents was entirely domain-specific; whenever they addressed a new game, they had to learn everything from scratch. The agents trained inside XLand, though, can transfer their skills into unfamiliar domains. Their intelligence is of a more general kind, and that’s a real advance.
The end goal here? An AI that can navigate changing or ambiguous informational landscapes just as we do. But we’re a long way from that right now.
Meanwhile, that dose of reality. Researchers in Israel have created a neural network that makes ‘master faces’: images capable of hoaxing facial recognition systems. They say just nine master faces can impersonate the facial IDs of over 40% of the global population.
Meanwhile, a British MP is campaigning for a ban on AI tools that turn ordinary photos of people into fake nudes. These tools have exploded in popularity across the last year; one had over 5 million visits in June alone.
⚡ NWSH Take: DeepMind’s quest for a general AI is exhilarating. If we ever get there, this research may come to be seen as foundational. In the meantime, AIs with even an incrementally greater ability to generalise will bring all kinds of new opportunities. On the other side of the AI balance this week: master faces and deepnudes. // In the end, of course, AI is neither dream nor nightmare. Like any technology, it’s a tool that both grants us new powers and imposes its own strange logic on us, and one that leaves us the ethically flawed creatures we’ve always been. The impacts of AI will be potent, unpredictable, and difficult to control. We urgently need new frameworks that help us navigate that world. // Plenty of AI ethics institutes are springing up. It’s possible to believe in the noble intentions of the DeepMind team while being troubled by news this week that, in Europe at least, the leading examples all take funding from DeepMind’s parent company, Alphabet.
🚨 Call the pseudo-cops
Neighbourhood security app Citizen made headlines again this week.
The app, which sends users real-time alerts of crimes unfolding around them, has launched a new paid service called Citizen Protect. For a low, low price of just $19.99 per month, users can hit a button during an emergency and get instant remote access to a Protect Agent, who will offer expert advice, guide the user to a safe place, and notify first responders if necessary.
Citizen has had a controversial 12 months. In May it offered a $30,000 reward to anyone who helped track down a homeless man accused of starting the California wildfires; he turned out to be wrongly accused. And leaked emails reveal the company has plans to deploy a fleet of emergency vehicles, which will deliver their Protect Agents to crime scenes at the behest of users.
⚡ NWSH Take: Citizen was initially banned from the App Store over fears of vigilantism. It may have unintentionally stoked those fears with its launch name: Vigilante. // I think you see where I’m going. This app is yet another powerful example of the ways technologies unlock new ways to serve fundamental human needs and social goods. But a few thousand years into the journey that is civilisation, we’ve decided that some social goods – including law enforcement – are best managed by the state. // So the other powerful lesson here? Just because a technology unlocks a new capability, that doesn’t mean we should use it. A VC-funded Uber for pseudo-police Protect Agents? Let’s leave it on the shelf.
💥 Boom thing
NASA released a time lapse video this week, showing ongoing construction of its coming X-59 supersonic jet.
The new plane will fly for the first time in 2022. It’s designed to reach speeds of 1,488km/hr – which is Mach 1.4 – and to emit an ultra-quiet sonic boom, making flights over the continental United States and other populated areas feasible.
In The Future that Never Came, I wrote about the new Overture supersonic jet from startup Boom Technologies. And on why – after decades of apparent stagnation – we may be on the verge of a new wave of transformative real-world innovation.
Put the X-59 down as another indication that it’s really happening. And throw in news that the UK plans to build the world’s first prototype magnetised fusion power plant. A reliable stream of carbon-free energy will be a key component in any push to transcend the Great Stagnation.
🗓️ Also this week
🥝 New Zealand is the best place to take shelter in the event of global societal collapse. A new study published in the journal Sustainability rated nations on their resilience against shocks such as a global financial crisis or climate emergency.
👾 Chinese state media says video gaming is a ‘spiritual opium’ that’s causing massive harm to young people. In New Week #43 I wrote on how Tencent is using webcam-enabled facial verification to prevent Chinese teens gaming at night.
🍏 Apple is closing down internal Slack channels where employees were drawing up a petition against new rules ordering a return to the office. The firm has told staff they’ll be expected back in the Cupertino HQ on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays at a minimum.
❄️ Researchers at Stanford and Princeton say they’ve created the world’s first time crystal. Able to oscillate between two states without ever losing energy, they could usher in a new era in quantum computing.
⚖️ An Australian judge says AIs should be able to own intellectual property. Judge Jonathan Beach was ruling on the case of an AI called Dabus; its owners say it should be recognised as the inventor of a new kind of food container.
📦 UK insiders at Amazon’s drone delivery project, Prime Air, say the project is collapsing. Over 100 members of the UK team have just lost their jobs.
🧊 A ‘massive melting event’ has struck Greenland after record temperatures. Danish researchers say that since July 27, roughly 8.5 billion metric tons of ice has been lost each day from the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet: twice the normal average rate of loss at this time of year.
🔮 The Pentagon say it is using AI to see days into the future. US military officials say their programme uses real-time data and machine learning to envision events before they occur.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,884,019,651
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7897973094
💉 Global population vaccinated: 14.9%
🗓️ 2021 progress bar: 59% complete
📖 On this day: On 4 August 1834 the British mathematician John Venn, inventor of the Venn diagram, was born in Yorkshire.
Future Supersonic
Thanks for reading this week.
Via advances in AI, genetic technologies, clean energy and more, we stand on the eve of an amazing new era for real-world innovation.
There’s much about the world to come that will challenge us. But much to be optimistic about, too. And New World Same Humans will keep working to make sense of what it all means.
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I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.